Out of curiosity, can someone explain to me how do you measure skill in pve if it isnt metrics or speedruns.
Skill technically cannot be measured in any form of reliable all-encompassing metric; however, the metrics do give insight into a lot of correlating attributes in relation to skill. The metrics are always only a measurement of the actual act itself and can never provide context. If someone is extremely skilled at running a 100 meter dash or can climb a rope to the top in record speeds does that mean they have the toolset necessary to overcome an obstacle course?
The word skill itself is nebulous at best. Often time, in World of Warcraft, people mean things like mental agility, reaction time, and focus. Unfortunately there are a lot of other skills that contribute to being good in WoW. Your situational awareness, ability to delegate, ability to listen, ability to process a hierarchy of mental queues and arrange those tasks in a proper order in real time, ability to network with other players, ability to read other players actions, natural internal timer sense, the conscientiousness to be prepared for a raid and all situations, the ability to remain clear headed for when things are right, wrong, managing trinkets, cooldowns, etc... the ability to defuse a situation between conflicting temperaments in other players, ability to track on screen and off screen objects, endurance, attention-span, ability to re-write muscle memory, real time adaptive spacial awareness, abstract conceptual formulation, ability to articulate verbally scenarios or information accurately and immediately, etc..........
Having said all that, let me explain a few scenarios where the metrics would be lying if they were used purely as a barometer of skill. This comes from someone who brings great attention to how people are performing.
Situation #1: Patchwerk. 3-4 tanks have normal hit points but the other 36ish raiders are at 1 hit point. If a healer is #1 on healing but only healed everyone other than tanks for the duration of the fight then that player actually contributed nothing as the mechanics of Patchwerk only deal damage to the main tank and hateful strike targets. The metrics would indicate he is the "most skilled". Lesson: While a 1 equals a 1 objectively with no context, the context creates a highly complicated formula in which the value of 1 hit point healed on a tank is infinitely more valuable than 1 hit point healed anywhere else.
Situation #2: Warrior is on top of DPS meters on Flamegore. Warrior steals aggro for a split second and being attacked which crits, giving him an enrage proc and allowing him to deal excessive amounts of damage. Unfortunately it also timed exactly with a shadow flame and half the raid dies. He is still number 1 for DPS for all time; however, metrics do not reflect his ability to naturally have perceptual awareness of his threat and the timers of shadow flame, causing harm to the rest of the raid.
I could come up with a million of examples from lack of totem twisting, to not saving energy to kick as a rogue, to dispelling non-essential debuffs like mana ignite on warriors during Baron Geddon, not measuring the perfect timed powerword shield or natures swiftness, etc... you get the point.
The metrics are important and they do reflect aspects of skill but they do not measure skill.